GMails new feaure - self cleaning mailboxes

[SYNACK]

Seems the cloud is not all sunshine and sometimes heralds rain. Gmail has just accidentally wiped 150k of their user accounts back to factory fresh empty mailboxes.

Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish into the cloud? (update) -- Engadget

If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on. While we haven't experienced the issue personally, we're hearing that the bug effectively reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users complete with welcome messages. For its part, Google says that the issue "affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase," engineers are working to fix the issue right now, and that missing messages will be restored as soon as possible. We'll soon see if this is a momentary setback... or a lengthy wakeup call.

Gmail Accidentally Resets 150,000 Accounts - Slashdot

Yes it does affect a small amount of their overall userbase and they seem to be confident that they can restore the email but this is still shows that the almighty cloud is quite fallible and indeed has risks of its own.

[mattx]

Epic Fail - and one for the 'Single Point Of Failure' argument.

[Hightower]

So is it 500,000 or 150,000?

[AngryTechnician]

Wonder if any of them were also Vodafone users in the Thames Valley area and got doubly shafted by no email and no phone service?

BBC News - Thousands lose Vodafone service